Sunday, March 15, 2009

So...one thing that I have learned over my nearly 11 years of marriage is to communicate your expectations. Such as...if you have plans on Saturday to sleep in, you should communicate that to your spouse. That way, if they have other plans, your plan and theirs do not come into comflict with each other. I have never found this advice to be more apparent to do than recently.

Last June, my wife and I finnally took the plunge and bought a house (of course, we are now thinking "why did we not wait..." anyway...). I have been itching to do some home improvements such as painting. When we bought our house, we thought that the painting looked great, and were the colors that we liked. However, after being in it nearly a year, and discovering that the paint is not condusive to washing...it was time to being to paint our dining/living room.

Two weeks ago, I came home with litterally every same of color of paint from Home Depot and Lowe's. This litterally was about 300 color samples. I told my wife...Here you go...pick one. Of course, we started looking at earth tones (which was the existing color of the room). Then my wife went to blues, greys, greens...literlly every color of the rainbow and every hune. So, we narrowed it down to two dozen and my wife refused to pick a color. So on Saturday, I lost it...I decided that one way to motivate my wife to pick a color was to being masking the room and preparing the walls (this perhaps is where communicating my expectation would have come in good). She did not take me serious until I came home from Wal-Mart with the putty, knife, and painters tape.

Next, my wife decided that she would like to go and get her nails done. While she was gone, I thought....this was my opportunity. I began masking and covering up all the holes in the wall. By the time she got home, there were several white spots one the wall, and blue take everywhere. This was a motivator because within a half hour, my wife had picked a color. So off to Lowe's I go with my paint color in hand.

Let me stop here for a moment to tell you the color she choose. Salamander Green! Sure...in the picture it looked good, but would it look good on our walls?

Because I was painting in such a central part of our house, I did nto want to paint until my kids had gone to bed. So when they were tucked into their beds, I started by paiting around the trim of the room. After this was done, it was 10:00 p.m. I whent next to get my paint roller, and I discovered that there was a used paint roller on the roller and I could not get it off. AHHHHH....so off into the night I went to find a new roller. Yes, it was past 10:00 at this point, but I could not let it go. I ended up at Wal-Mart, but by 10:30, I was home and ready to paint.

So..by 11:30, I did have one wall done, but the challenge is that this room is only served by natural light (and a chandeler in the dinging room). Thus, I could not tell if I had done a good job of painting.

Oh...another stopping point. I found it odd that my wife decided to get her nails done one the day that I started to paint. This is the morale of the story...Had I communicated my intent and my desire for her help (which I did not really want), she may not have gotten her nails done. But since she did, there was no way she was going to help me. She did sit on the couch and tell me where I missed a spot...Nuggest of Joy!!!!

This morning, I was awaken by my four year old going WOW....and running up and down the hall way. He had gone in and awaken all of his siblings to show them what he had found on the wall. Also...on the other walls, I kinda did grafitti to get the paint out of the paint brushes, so he thought that was cool. To my surprise...the salamander green does look good!